For reasons unknown I got a recent rash of questions about Civil 3D Label behavior when you employ XREFs. You do know you can label Civil 3D features from XREFs, don’t you?
Autodesk hasn’t really updated this functionality lately.
Yes. There are some weird things about it that can trip up the unwary.
Where is 0,0,0?
It seems reasonable to most folks that two drawings the share the same assigned coordinate systems would allow Civil 3D XREF labelling between them. Sadly, this is NOT so.
If you want remote XREF labelling to work you must employ the standard AutoCAD insertion point method @ 0,0,0. Huh?
“Isn’t the coordinate system assigned point at 0,0,0 too?”
Not exactly.
Why?
Simply put if Autodesk supported coordinate system attachments then they would have to support drawings in different coordinate systems too.
You know the drill-
If you give a mouse a cookie…
Now That would be really handy at times.
Please tell Autodesk to update this feature.
My guess is Autodesk considered that that functionality would be too much coding work for the Civil 3D Label engine.
I Can’t Label This or That
There are a couple of tricks if you want to employ XREF Alignment Group Labels.
Oh. Yes. You can do that. See the video. Easy as pie or maybe cookie baking anyway.
These annotative Alignment gems I’ve discussed elsewhere in multiple blog posts.
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The Framework for AutoCAD Civil 3D contains a lot of annotative Alignment Label Styles that do some way cool things. This is really handy via XREFs when you need these graphics that way on this plan sheet, but not on that plan sheet.
I hope you catch the drift.